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    The Hoffa Wars: The Rise and Fall of Jimmy Hoffa
    The Hoffa Wars: The Rise and Fall of Jimmy Hoffa
    The Hoffa Wars: The Rise and Fall of Jimmy Hoffa
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    The Hoffa Wars: The Rise and Fall of Jimmy Hoffa

    By Mark Crispin Miller and Dan E. Moldea

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    The definitive portrait of the powerful, corruption-ridden Teamsters union and its legendary president, Jimmy Hoffa—organizer, gangster, convict, and conspirator—with a new afterword by the author

    James Riddle “Jimmy” Hoffa was one of the most fascinating and controversial figures in twentieth-century America. His remarkable journey from young union organizer to all-powerful head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters is an epic tale worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster, jam-packed with intrigue, subterfuge, violence, and corruption. His successes were monumental, his fall truly spectacular, and his bizarre disappearance in the summer of 1975 remains one of the great mysteries in American history.

    Widely considered to be the definitive volume on the career and crimes of Jimmy Hoffa, The Hoffa Wars, by acclaimed investigative journalist Dan E. Moldea, is an eye-opening, extensively researched account of the steady rise and fall of an ingenious, ambitious man who was instrumental in transforming a small union of seventy-five thousand truckers into the most powerful labor brotherhood in world. Shocking disclosures in Moldea’s no-holds-barred account include the devil’s bargain that put Hoffa and his union in the pockets of the Mob, Hoffa’s role in the joint CIA-Mafia plots to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro, the deal Hoffa made with US president Richard Nixon that released the disgraced Teamster president from prison eight years early, and the truth behind Hoffa’s eventual disappearance and likely murder. But perhaps the most startling revelation of all concerns the integral part Jimmy Hoffa played, in concert with underworld kingpins Carlos Marcello and Santos Trafficante, in America’s most terrible twentieth-century crime: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateMar 3, 2015
    ISBN9781497697850
    The Hoffa Wars: The Rise and Fall of Jimmy Hoffa
    Author

    Dan E. Moldea

    Dan E. Moldea, a specialist on organized-crime investigations since 1974, bestselling author, and independent journalist, has published eight nonfiction books: The Hoffa Wars: Teamsters, Rebels, Politicians and the Mob (1978); The Hunting of Cain: A True Story of Money, Greed and Fratricide (1983); Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob (1986); Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football (1989); The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy: An Investigation of Motive, Means, and Opportunity (1995); Evidence Dismissed: The Inside Story of the Police Investigation of O.J. Simpson (with Tom Lange and Philip Vannatter, 1997); A Washington Tragedy: How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited a Political Firestorm (1998); and Confessions of a Guerrilla Writer: Adventures in the Jungles of Crime, Politics, and Journalism (2013). He is currently at work on his ninth true-crime book.

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      The Hoffa Wars - Mark Crispin Miller

      Introduction

      I

      We the people seem to have the freest book trade in the world. Certainly we have the biggest. Cruise the mighty Amazon, and you will see so many books for sale in the United States today as would require more than four hundred miles of shelving to display them—a bookshelf that would stretch from Boston’s Old North Church to Fort McHenry in South Baltimore.

      Surely that huge catalog is proof of our extraordinary freedom of expression: The US government does not ban books, because the First Amendment won’t allow it. While books are widely banned in states like China and Iran, no book may be forbidden by the US government at any level (although the CIA censors books by former officers). Where books are banned in the United States, the censors tend to be private organizations-church groups, school boards, and other local (busy)bodies roused to purify the public schools or libraries nearby.

      Despite such local prohibitions, we can surely find any book we want. After all, it’s easy to locate those hot works that once were banned by the government as too obscene to sell, or mail, until the courts ruled otherwise on First Amendment grounds—Fanny Hill, Howl, Naked Lunch. We also have no trouble finding books banned here and there as antifamily, Satanic, racist, and/or filthy, from Huckleberry Finn to Heather Has Two Mommies to the Harry Potter series, just to name a few.

      II

      And yet, the fact that those bold books are all in print, and widely read, does not mean that we have the freest book trade in the world. On the contrary: For over half a century, America’s vast literary culture has been disparately policed, and imperceptibly contained, by state and corporate entities well placed and perfectly equipped to wipe out wayward writings. Their ad hoc suppressions through the years have been far more effectual than those quixotic bans imposed on classics like The Catcher in the Rye and Fahrenheit 451. For every one of those bestsellers scandalously purged from some provincial school curriculum, there are many others (we can’t know how many) that have been so thoroughly erased that few of us, if any, can remember them, or have ever heard of them.

      How have all those books (to quote George Orwell) dropped into the memory hole in these United States? As America does not ban books, other means—less evident, and so less controversial—have been deployed to vaporize them. Some almost never made it into print, as publishers were privately warned off them from on high, either on the grounds of national security or with blunt threats of endless corporate litigation. Other books were signed enthusiastically—then dumped, as their own publishers mysteriously failed to market them, or even properly distribute them. But it has mainly been the press that stamps out inconvenient books, either by ignoring them, or—most often—laughing them off as conspiracy theory, despite their soundness (or because of it).

      Once out of print, those books are gone. Even if some few of us have not forgotten them, and one might find used copies here and there, these books have disappeared. Missing from the shelves and never mentioned in the press (and seldom mentioned even in our schools), each book thus neutralized might just as well have been destroyed en masse—or never written in the first place, for all their contribution to the public good.

      III

      The purpose of this series is to bring such vanished books to life—first life for those that never saw the light of day, or barely did, and second life for those that got some notice, or even made a splash, then slipped too quickly out of print, and out of mind.

      These books, by and large, were made to disappear, or were hastily forgotten, not because they were too lewd, heretical, or unpatriotic for some touchy group of citizens. These books sank without a trace, or faded fast, because they tell the sort of truths that Madison and Jefferson believed our Constitution should protect—truths that the people have the right to know, and needs to know, about our government and other powers that keep us in the dark.

      Thus the works on our Forbidden Bookshelf shed new light—for most of us, it’s still new light—on the most troubling trends and episodes in US history, especially since World War II: America’s broad use of former Nazis and ex-Fascists in the Cold War; the Kennedy assassinations, and the murders of Martin Luther King Jr., Orlando Letelier, George Polk, and Paul Wellstone; Ronald Reagan’s Mafia connections, Richard Nixon’s close relationship with Jimmy Hoffa, and the mob’s grip on the NFL; America’s terroristic Phoenix Program in Vietnam, US support for South America’s most brutal tyrannies, and CIA involvement in the Middle East; the secret histories of DuPont, ITT, and other giant US corporations; and the long war waged by Wall Street and its allies in real estate on New York City’s poor and middle class.

      The many vanished books on these forbidden subjects (among others) altogether constitute a shadow history of America—a history that We the People need to know at last, our country having now become a land with billionaires in charge, and millions not allowed to vote, and everybody under full surveillance. Through this series, we intend to pull that necessary history from the shadows at long last—to shed some light on how America got here, and how we might now take it somewhere else.

      Mark Crispin Miller

      Introduction

      The re-publication of The Hoffa Wars is a welcome event.

      The Hoffa Wars tells an important story: how a potentially great force for good—the unionization of America’s truckers and warehouse laborers—was captured by gangsters and converted into a monster that robbed its members of their right to a fair wage and pension, robbed businessmen of their right to a free marketplace and clamped a high tax on American consumers every time they went to the cash register.

      Dan Moldea’s book stands above the journalistic exposés and glossy tomes that were published in abundance when the Hoffa case was the crime of the decade and the Teamsters were a national scandal. What differentiates this book, and makes it of continuing importance to anyone interested in the fabric of American society, is that it is documented as thoroughly on the streets as it is in libraries and courthouses. Danny knew the workingmen who lived this story. He worked with them. And he was able to combine this street experience and personal empathy with the skills of a professional journalist. Few writers can bring that combination to their work.

      Every page shows it. Dan not only knew the union members, he was able to talk to the mid-level officers—the local presidents and vice-presidents torn between the graft at Hoffa’s level and the needs of the truckers. And he talked to them not as other reporters had to, by appointment across desks. He talked to them in grungy cafes or on loading docks, as one of the boys. Reading The Hoffa Wars, you don’t have to be told of the violent atmosphere that influenced everything about the Teamsters. You feel it.

      I mostly delighted in reading this book upon its initial publication in 1978. But in one chapter, I thought Dan had gone off the deep end. That is where he suggested that the gangsters who controlled the Teamsters Union were involved in a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy Yes, there were some suspicious coincidences, but it seemed to me the evidence was too circumstantial to justify such a radical thought.

      Now, of course, I know Dan was right about that as he was about other things. Within a year of the publication of The Hoffa Wars, the House Assassinations Committee has pursued the links that connected Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby through Carlos Marcello, the Texas-Louisiana Mafia boss. And the committee had built a solid case that Marcello had organized the Kennedy assassination, possibly with the complicity of his good friends Jimmy Hoffa and Florida Mafia boss Santos Trafficante. Hoffa had opened the Teamster coffers he was looting to the thieving hands of the Marcello organization. And the Kennedy brothers were trying to protect Teamster members, business people and the public by bringing this stealing to an end.

      In 1992, the case against Marcello, Hoffa and Trafficante was bolstered by the added testimony of Frank Ragano, a lawyer who had represented both Hoffa and Marcello. Ragano says he carried messages between the two men about assassinating Kennedy. For the U.S. Attorney General and Dallas prosecutors to continue to refuse to reopen the Kennedy case would now seem a blatant neglect of duty. A living, willing witness (Ragano) has offered eyewitness testimony that a living suspect (Marcello) conspired to murder President Kennedy, a crime with no statute of limitations.

      This was not just the crime of a decade, but the American crime of the century, and Dan Moldea, in The Hoffa Wars, was the first person to publicly arrive at what now appears to be the correct solution.

      I first came across Danny’s writings on the Teamsters in a small, northern Ohio newspaper, as I was starting to research the union. In 1974, I had written some articles for my own newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, on Mafia control of the food industry. Someone directed me to a series of articles that Jim Drinkhall (who later joined the Journal) was writing in the magazine Overdrive about Mafia control of the Teamsters. Drinkhall’s work excited me, and I delved into Teamster corruption, which inevitably led me to Danny.

      Drinkhall and Moldea were the two pioneers in that field. But while Drinkhall seemed to have breathtakingly good sources on the gangsters in Chicago, Cleveland, Las Vegas, Dallas and elsewhere who gobbled up the Teamsters loot, Danny was writing about the bitter effect this corruption had on decent, working people. So I read him, and we talked on the phone.

      I finally met Dan as the result of a call he made to me at the Journal two days after Hoffa was reported missing, whereabouts unknown. It was a hot Friday in early August, 1975. Popular speculation was that Hoffa had been kidnapped. Dan had a theory: that Hoffa, in the pattern of some previous mobsters, had arranged his own disappearance to avoid a prospective grand jury appearance and the possible wrath of his underworld associates. If so, where would Hoffa be hiding? Dan had pondered the question, and come up with the Jack-O-Lantern Lodge in Eagle River, Wisconsin, a resort on a lake where Teamster officials sometimes met. The lodge was occasionally used as a personal retreat by Hoffa and his chief moneyman Allen Dorfman.

      I did a little research. As Dan had told me, Hoffa and Dorfman (who was also later rubbed out) controlled the Jack-O-Lantern property. And beyond that, as Dan had said, the whole area was known since Prohibition days as a place where gangsters hid out while on the lam; Al Capone once hid there. I decided Dan’s reasoning made some sense, and called him back. He wanted to go to Eagle River to look for Hoffa, but was broke. Would the Journal fund him?

      Trepidly, I approached the Journal’s managing editor, Fred Taylor, describing Dan, and his idea. I said it had the scent of logic and the genius of novelty, but was still a very long shot, just a roll of the dice. Taylor wanted to go for it. Money was looser in those days, and finding Hoffa would be one hell of a scoop. But while Taylor wasn’t worried about the financial risk, he did express concern over the physical risk. I shrugged it off. Nevertheless, he instructed me to make sure that either Danny or I waited in town at a phone while the other visited the lodge. If the scout wasn’t heard from by an appointed hour, the person at the phone would call Taylor at home. Lord knows what Taylor would have done in such an event, but I agreed and headed for La Guardia.

      Airplane schedules being what they were and are, I first cast eyes on Dan at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, where he had arrived from Cleveland to meet me for the connecting flight to Eagle River. I hadn’t really known what to expect, but it certainly wasn’t what I saw. Dan was of a height and physique that might make one of Hoffa’s professional leg-breakers drop his tire iron and flee. A stranger seeing Dan board a plane to Wisconsin would have assumed he was reporting for duty to the Green Bay Packers.

      Furthermore, he was dressed head to foot in black, body-clinging clothing and was carrying a rope, underwater flashlight and snorkel gear. It might be necessary, he explained, to approach the Jack-O-Lantern Lodge stealthily, underwater from across the lake. I immediately decided that I would be the one who waited in town by the telephone.

      We rented a car and drove slowly by the entrance of the lodge trying to look as innocent as possible. The fences were decorated with Jack-O-Lanterns. Buildings were visible in the distance, but the only signs of life were some German shepherd dogs. The dogs convinced me I had made the right decision about who would go and who would wait.

      At about dusk, we pulled into Eagle River, a sleepy little place that even on a Friday evening at the height of the tourist season looked like one of those eerie ghost towns the guide books send you to in Colorado. I forget the name of the cafe with the public phone where I decided to hole up—Betty’s, I think, but maybe Ann’s. Anyway, it was deserted except for me and the waitress.

      Dan was to have called the cafe to assure me of his safety no later than ten o’clock, which was eleven New York time; I didn’t know when Taylor went to bed. Dan drove off looking confident. I sipped my coffee and watched eight o’clock pass. Nine. It grew to be five minutes of ten, and I started wondering what I would say if I had to make the phone call to Taylor.

      At two minutes of ten, Dan strode into the cafe looking serious and plopped down across from me, holding his arm. A dog had bit him. But two guards had pulled the dog off. He was all right. He wasn’t wet, either. He had decided to try the gate rather than go in underwater. He had fended off the dogs, talked his way past the guards and gained an audience with Allen Dorfman’s mother, an elderly lady who asserted that neither her son nor Mr. Hoffa was there. On the grounds, Dan met up with some other people and talked to them. There were groups of kids. That was important. Hoffa loved kids, and if Hoffa had been there, he could not have resisted playing with them. The kids all told Dan that Mr. Hoffa hadn’t been around in weeks. That cinched it for Dan. We were barking up the wrong tree.

      We did make friends with someone at Betty’s, or Ann’s, or our motel, who drove us around and showed us the various cabins in the woods where this or that mobster had allegedly hidden out in days gone by.

      The next morning, not wanting to leave Eagle River empty handed, I violated Taylor’s instructions and rode up to the lodge with Dan. The dogs barked and I exchanged a few words with Mrs. Dorfman, but failed to elicit anything that even a desperate gossip columnist could have elevated to the status of news. Then some tough-looking men asked us to leave, and we did.

      And remained good friends ever since.

      This experience helped me enjoy The Hoffa Wars when it came out even more than I would have otherwise.

      I hope learning about it has the same effect for you.

      Jonathan Kwitny

      PART ONE

      1 In Search of Jimmy Hoffa

      Jimmy Hoffa’s most valuable contribution to the American labor movement came at the moment he stopped breathing on July 30, 1975. The involuntary act occurred in the midst of his dramatic bid to recapture the general presidency of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which he had lost during nearly five years in prison. Still popular among reporters with short memories who insisted upon portraying him as a working-class hero, and among rank-and-file admirers who had forgiven him for stealing from them, Hoffa nevertheless had slim chances for a comeback.

      Convicted in two separate trials of jury tampering and defrauding the union’s pension fund, Hoffa had become an outsider to the Teamsters’ high command when he entered Lewisburg Penitentiary in March 1967. His union problems began in less than a month, when he and his successor, Frank Fitzsimmons, disagreed over an appointment. The increasingly bitter war between the two old friends lasted until Hoffa died, and it was to be carried on by Hoffa’s supporters even after he was gone.

      In 1967 Fitzsimmons suddenly inherited the uncontrollable monster Hoffa had created over the past twenty-five years: an alliance between the union and organized crime. Introduced to the underworld by a lover in the 1930s, by the 1940s Hoffa was asking for and getting muscle from the mob in a war with a rival union. He began using the Teamsters to provide his new allies with a façade of legitimacy, even for the international narcotics traffic, of which Detroit was a major center. In return Hoffa became rich and powerful, and so did the IBT. Wealth and power led to a second alliance, this one with corrupt politicians. The general public and the rank-and-file Teamsters, especially those who drove their own trucks, suffered from the two alliances.

      Unable and unwilling to battle the underworld, Fitzsimmons promptly decentralized the autocracy Hoffa had used to build his empire, hoping to insulate himself from direct contact with organized crime. Among the immediate benefactors of Fitzsimmons’ policies were local and regional Teamster leaders around the country, who acquired a considerable amount of new power in the two-million-member union. Instead of clamoring for the attention of one man, Hoffa, mobsters merely had to call their area Teamster representatives for a favor. Teamster bosses who cooperated became wealthy.

      Without the daily burden of defending his professional relationships with organized crime figures to the press and to the rank and file—as Hoffa had spent much of his career doing—Fitzsimmons used his free time backing up his union subordinates and making new friends in politics and big labor.

      Things were going well for the IBT under Fitzsimmons. Its first- and second-level officials were happy, and so was the National Crime Syndicate. Then, in November 1968, Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States. Because the Teamsters had gone with the rest of organized labor and supported Hubert Humphrey that year, Nixon’s election was bad news.

      Nixon had formed a quid pro quo alliance with Hoffa during his 1960 presidential campaign against John Kennedy, brother of Hoffa’s archenemy. Until he resigned to manage his brother’s campaign, Robert Kennedy was chief counsel to the Senate Rackets Committee, which investigated the Teamsters in general and Hoffa in particular. The extraordinary pressure Kennedy placed on Hoffa personally during the committee’s hearings, combined with rumors that Bobby Kennedy would become attorney general if his brother was elected, led Hoffa to put his union at Nixon’s disposal. According to Ed Partin, a former Hoffa aide turned government informant, in September 1960 the crime boss of Louisiana, Carlos Marcello, contributed $500,000 to the Nixon campaign through Hoffa and his associates. Within a few weeks after the alleged payoff, Nixon managed to stop a Florida land fraud indictment against Hoffa.

      So when Nixon finally won the presidency in 1968, it was no surprise to Fitzsimmons and the Teamster leadership that he was considering an early release for Hoffa. Unlike Fitzsimmons, Hoffa had supported Nixon in 1968 through his influence with remaining friends in the union.

      For Hoffa, however, problems remained and they would be his undoing.

      In Lewisburg he had made a prison alliance with dope trafficker Carmine Galante, the underboss of the Joseph Bonanno crime family of New York, which was in internal conflict over the line of succession. Although other mob families had at first been neutral in the Banana Wars, which lasted from 1963 to 1969, their attitude quickly changed when they uncovered a plot to murder two other New York crime bosses, Carlo Gambino and Thomas Lucchese. Because Bonanno’s son was implicated in the plot, the National Crime Syndicate’s ruling council ordered the elder Bonanno to respond to the charge. When Bonanno refused to cooperate and began to raid other underworld jurisdictions, he was expelled from the ruling council, which quietly began supporting the rebels in the Bonanno clan. Fearful of mob reprisals and government prosecution, Bonanno arranged for his own disappearance, which lasted from 1964 to 1966. While underground he made a coalition with two other powerful organized crime figures, Santos Trafficante of Florida and Carlos Marcello of Louisiana. Moving his New York operations to Arizona—where he already had considerable influence—Bonanno, with his new friends, formed a triumvirate that rivaled the New York underworld’s forces.

      By making his prison pact with Galante, Jimmy Hoffa became a key figure in this North-South power struggle. As president of the Teamsters he had had a close working relationship with the New York crime families as well as Marcello and Trafficante, but his ties to the latter two mobsters were exceptionally close and personal.

      After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, when Fidel Castro began throwing the American mob off the island, Marcello and Trafficante were among those exiled. Both lost their best heroin and gambling connection. Trying to recapture their lost territory, Trafficante and other gangsters—including Sam Giancana of Chicago and Russell Bufalino of Pennsylvania—agreed to work with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in a direct action against Castro. Strong evidence points to the fact that the original middleman between the CIA and the American underworld was Jimmy Hoffa, who used the union’s financial machinery for arms sales to both sides in the Cuban Revolution.

      There is solid evidence as well that Hoffa, Marcello, and Trafficante—three of the most important targets for criminal prosecution by the Kennedy Administration—had discussions with their subordinates about murdering President Kennedy. Associates of Hoffa, Trafficante, and Marcello were in direct contact with Jack Ruby, the Dallas night-club owner who killed the lone assassin of the President. Although members of the Warren Commission, which investigated President Kennedy’s assassination, had knowledge of much of this information at the time of their inquiry, they chose not to follow it up. Marcello and Trafficante continued to support Hoffa after his convictions, offering bribes to a key witness to recant his testimony against Hoffa.

      But while the southern underworld remained loyal to Hoffa, the New York mobs were shifting their alliances to Frank Fitzsimmons.

      While Hoffa made friends with Galante and Bonanno did the same with Marcello and Trafficante, New York mob leaders began to realize that Hoffa’s return to power in the union could wreck their business interests in the IBT. If Hoffa began favoring the Bonanno-Marcello-Trafficante alliance in the South—and there was every reason why he should, since he knew he was being betrayed elsewhere—there was a very real danger of a breakup of the National Crime Syndicate, with its traditional allotted spheres of interest. One indication of trouble to come was that in prison both Hoffa and Galante had brief fistfights with Anthony Provenzano, a captain in the Vito Genovese crime family, which had aligned itself with the New York families opposing Bonanno. A New Jersey Teamster leader, IBT vice president, and former ally of Hoffa, Provenzano had been an active participant in the battle up to the time he was jailed. He had ordered the locals under his control not to pay the Bonanno men who were on Teamster payrolls.

      Knowing that if Hoffa was released from jail he and his allies would retaliate financially, the northern underworld and pro-Fitzsimmons union leaders turned their attention to President Nixon. Fitzsimmons’ influence with the new President was minimal, but the Teamster president did know Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, with whom he had numerous conversations in 1969. It is reasonable to assume that the two men reviewed the situation between organized crime and the Teamsters Union, along with the underworld’s growing internal problems; and that both men believed armed warfare could explode if Hoffa was permitted to return to power in the union. The prospect must have been deeply alarming to an attorney general serving under a President who had promised the American public law and order. At any rate, during 1969 the Nixon Administration balked at releasing Hoffa and kept him in prison.

      In February 1969, less than a month after Nixon took office, the Banana Wars ended, and the Teamsters and the mob began to neutralize Hoffa by winning over his allies in both groups. Respected among all parties and put in control of the union’s pension and welfare funds by Hoffa, Chicago underworld associate Allen Dorfman became Fitzsimmons’ peacemaker. His job was to be sure that every section of organized crime got its fair share of the union’s billion-dollar pension and welfare funds.

      Hoffa’s support within the underworld and among Teamster leaders whom the mob controlled dwindled steadily. By mid-1971 the White House had forced Hoffa to resign all his union offices in return for an early release. This set the stage for Fitzsimmons’ election as IBT general president the following month, and for Hoffa’s restricted commutation of sentence in December, which barred him from union office until 1980.

      The Hoffa issue had drawn the White House, the Teamsters, and organized crime closer together. Although the Justice Department successfully prosecuted Allen Dorfman and associates of Marcello and Trafficante—all for misuse of Teamster funds—John Mitchell was personally responsible for numerous aborted prosecutions of underworld figures during his four-year tenure. Several investigations of Teamster officials, including one against Fitzsimmons’ son Richard, were dropped without explanation.

      As a result, Fitzsimmons, the IBT’s general executive board, and the mob gave Nixon their full support during his 1972 reelection campaign. The only IBT board member who refused to back Nixon was named a White House enemy and had his income tax returns audited the following year. Fitzsimmons became personally involved in a dirty tricks campaign against Senator Edward Kennedy, a potential challenger to Nixon. Allen Dorfman chipped in a $100,000 contribution which he gave illegally to John Mitchell. And after the Watergate burglars began blackmailing the White House, the mob came through in January 1973 with a million dollars in hush money—delivery arranged by Fitzsimmons, Provenzano (out of prison since 1970), and Dorfman.

      The press, which was concentrating on Watergate, did not notice for a while that Hoffa was patiently putting together the machinery for a comeback, which included a suit against the restrictions on his commutation. Although the battle between him and Fitzsimmons was for control of the international union, the battleground would be their home-town local, Detroit’s Local 299. And in Local 299, as in the union at large, loss of support from both the underworld and top Teamster leaders left Hoffa surrounded by powerless allies, most of them rank-and-file loyalists who clung to the myth of Hoffa as their defender.

      Although grandfatherly Prank Fitzsimmons was more amiable and easier to talk to than Jimmy Hoffa ever was or could be, that image never seemed to filter down to the rank and file. To them Fitzsimmons was Hoffa’s shoeshine boy, who was handed and did not earn the number one spot in the union. By 1974, caught up in the drama of Hoffa’s possible return to power, the press had picked up the theme and forever labeled Fitzsimmons as he was perceived by the membership. It was a bad rap to lay on Fitzsimmons, and it simply wasn’t true. Defensive about being compared so unfavorably to Hoffa, Fitzsimmons drew further and further away from the rank and file.

      In the years before he took over, Fitzsimmons had merely exhibited the loyalty that any subordinate should give his boss. A tough street fighter in the old days, a man who had held his own in all the brawls with rival unions, Fitzsimmons was a streetwise former trucker whom Hoffa had trusted and depended upon since the thirties. Perhaps that was reason enough for Hoffa to make Fitzsimmons his successor, but according to a Teamster official who was close to both men, Fitzsimmons was the Detroit underworld’s choice. Certainly he was no stranger to the mob. The succession was allegedly arranged after Hoffa appealed to Detroit’s top don to get rid of a local gangster who was having an affair with his wife. Soon after Josephine Hoffa’s lover was sent to jail for stock fraud, Hoffa named Fitzsimmons his heir apparent.

      Hoffa never operated in the heroic vacuum that was glamorized throughout his career. His successes and failures were in large part determined by who his friends and enemies were at each point in his life. Besides Fitzsimmons, two other men were of special importance in his rise to power: Dave Johnson and Rolland McMaster. Dissident truckers who, along with Fitzsimmons, joined and cleaned up Local 299 in 1935, Johnson and McMaster were major reasons for Hoffa’s early victories. As his two top organizers they were probably more responsible than anyone else, even Hoffa, for pulling the entire midwestern trucking industry into the Teamsters during the 1940s and 1950s. They were partners who battled strikebreakers and rival unions on the front lines while Hoffa was by then sitting behind a desk calling the shots. Rewarded with top positions in the local—Johnson as recording secretary and McMaster as secretary-treasurer—they kept Local 299 functioning after Hoffa and Fitzsimmons went to Washington to run the IBT from its new headquarters. And when Hoffa and Fitzsimmons began their power struggle, no two people were more vital to it than Johnson and McMaster.

      McMaster was the reason for the split between Hoffa and Fitzsimmons. It was his appointment as chief executive officer of Local 299 after his release from an extortion sentence that Hoffa protested from jail. Hoffa, who had decided that McMaster was probably a government informant, wanted Johnson, now secretary-treasurer, to hold major power in the local as his most trusted lieutenant.

      One of the most serious problems Hoffa faced during his tenure as general president was the isolated pockets of rank-and-file resistance that challenged his leadership. Handfuls of bold rebels kept organizing in cities on both coasts, throughout the Midwest, and even in Detroit, forcing Hoffa to buy them off or physically intimidate them. But when new groups of reformers kept coming over the hill—some trying to overthrow their local union officials and others campaigning for decertification from the union—Hoffa had the IBT constitution revised to grant himself absolute control. Later, it was the Hoffa constitution that Fitzsimmons used to keep Hoffa out of power.

      No match for the Teamsters’ money and muscle, rebel movements struck hard but faded fast in the Hoffa years. Without a national organization the reform groups were crashing their heads into brick walls. Then in 1964 Hoffa himself gave the rebels the organizing tool they needed by negotiating the union’s first national contract—a master collective bargaining agreement for Teamster members all over the country. From here on all Teamsters would have the same conditions and the same timetable for protest.

      The first rebels to realize that Hoffa had handed them the common ground they needed were the steel haulers in Gary, Indiana, most of whom drove their own trucks and as owner-operators had long been exploited by the union. Too late to affect negotiations for the 1964 agreement, the steel haulers prepared for a full-scale revolt in 1967, when the next contract would be negotiated. That year the dissidents staged the first national wildcat strike in Teamster history. Giving Fitzsimmons his first major headache as acting president of the union, the rebels paralyzed the steel industry in eight states and affected the manufacturing of steel products all over the country. The protest failed to win them any real concessions from either union or management, but they had proved their unity and shown Fitzsimmons that he was just as threatened by the rank and file as Hoffa had been.

      Formed during the 1967 strike, the Fraternal Association of Steel Haulers, centered in Pennsylvania and Ohio, split from the union and became an independent bargaining agent—but only after a bloody shoot-out with the Teamsters in October 1969 and a second national strike the following year.

      An old hand at suppressing dissident uprisings, Rolland McMaster was appointed to handle the IBT’s problems with FASH, but the owner-operators of FASH made a degree of common cause with the Detroit rebels and McMaster became increasingly unpopular with the rank and file. Knowing that Hoffa was plotting against him from Lewisburg, McMaster sent him a threatening letter warning him to stay out of Local 299’s internal affairs. Outraged, Hoffa retaliated through Dave Johnson, who was ordered to get McMaster out of Local 299. Johnson’s opportunity came in December 1970, when he and one of McMaster’s organizers had a fight in the union hall. Johnson used the incident to have McMaster purged, and, to avoid mutiny in Detroit, Fitzsimmons went along. Johnson became president of Local 299 and McMaster vowed to get even.

      Fitzsimmons had no intention of losing his top enforcer; McMaster remained the overall head of the union’s battle against FASH. He established a thirty-man organizing team which had a dual role: to organize truckers and to watch Jimmy Hoffa after he got out of jail. During the two-year history of the campaign, bombings, shootings, and sabotage were commonplace against both antiunion companies and Hoffa supporters.

      In February 1974, McMaster’s national task force was disbanded after spending more than a million dollars of union money while organizing only 750 new members. It had served primarily as a smokescreen to get employers to pay for labor peace.

      That same month the owner-operators shut down nationwide for the third time in as many months, protesting fuel prices. The massive demonstration also became a protest against Fitzsimmons, especially in Detroit. Some of the leaders of the shutdown had aligned themselves with Hoffa, who was now promising them better conditions if he returned as IBT president.

      By now Hoffa’s open attacks on Fitzsimmons and his appeal against the district court that had sustained Nixon’s commutation restrictions had alarmed both the Teamster high command and the mob. In mid-1974, according to a former McMaster task force organizer, Fitzsimmons gave McMaster a blank check to make sure Hoffa did not return to power in Local 299, the necessary stepping stone to the IBT presidency. Johnson had indicated that if Hoffa’s court battles were successful he was willing to give Local 299 to Hoffa. Thus Fitzsimmons’ major target was Dave Johnson, Hoffa’s only hope of regaining control.

      Soon after the blank check was issued, Johnson’s cabin cruiser was bombed at its mooring behind his home on Grosse Ile, near Detroit. The leading suspect in the government’s investigation was a former member of McMaster’s organizing task force.

      With pressure mounting on Johnson to resign and forsake Hoffa, Richard Fitzsimmons announced that he was planning to run against Johnson for Local 299 president; he had earlier replaced his father as the local’s vice president, a position the elder Fitzsimmons had held since 1946. McMaster was running as Richard Fitzsimmons’ vice presidential candidate. With violence spreading as the election approached, the Detroit joint council proposed and Local 299’s executive board agreed to bring the Hoffa and Fitzsimmons forces together in a coalition slate: Johnson would remain president and young Fitzsimmons would settle for the vice presidency again. McMaster was left off the ticket at Johnson’s insistence. But after one of his organizers had stalled the election for a month by filing suit against the local, McMaster came back and announced as a candidate for president against Johnson. Furious, Johnson threatened to torpedo the coalition if McMaster remained in the race, and Fitzsimmons ordered McMaster to withdraw.

      McMaster’s strongarm men shuttled in and out of Detroit—two of them living rent free in a hotel owned by McMaster’s closest business associates—and violence against Hoffa supporters increased. Then, on July 10, 1975—twenty days before Hoffa disappeared—Richard Fitzsimmons’ union car was bombed. The government’s two major suspects in that bombing were the two men from the hotel.

      Possibly they were trying to stir up enough violence to give Frank Fitzsimmons justification for putting Local 299 into trusteeship—where it had been long ago, before the reformers, now rulers, cleaned it up. Fitzsimmons could then bring in his own batch of new officers and close Hoffa out forever. Or possibly the bombing was a theatrical device to set the stage—and confuse the audience—for Hoffa’s disappearance. A few weeks before the bombing an interesting meeting was noticed at an airport near Detroit. According to an eyewitness, two men climbed out of a private plane and were greeted by McMaster, who drove them away and brought them back several hours later. One of the two men was identified as New Jersey Teamster leader Anthony Provenzano. The significance of this meeting could be somewhat better understood a few weeks later.

      In mid-June, before the McMaster-Provenzano meeting, and a few days prior to his scheduled appearance before a Senate Select Committee investigating CIA-underworld plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, the Chicago mobster Sam Giancana was murdered at his home. A trusted underworld informant who was close to him told a House committee investigating the CIA that Sam Giancana was executed by underworld associates who had also been involved in the assassination plots.

      According to a former Hoffa aide—later a government informant—who believes his boss was the CIA’s initial go-between with the mob in the Castro murder plan, McMaster was Hoffa’s liaison to Santos Trafficante during the planning of the assassination in the early 1960s. Russell Bufalino had also been among the mob chieftains whom the CIA solicited for direct action against Castro, and Genovese crime captain Provenzano had in 1974 come under the jurisdiction of gangland leaders, including Russell Bufalino, who were now trustees of the Genovese family.

      On the final day of Hoffa’s life, Bufalino was driven into Detroit early in the morning by Frank Sheeran, a Delaware Teamster boss who was a long-time friend of Hoffa. Along with several union rebels, Sheeran was a co-plaintiff in Hoffa’s suit against the commutation restrictions. According to government investigators, later that day Sheeran picked up three of Provenzano’s men—Salvatore Briguglio, Gabriel Briguglio, and Thomas Andretta—at a nearby airport and took them to the temporary residence of Hoffa’s foster son, IBT general organizer Charles O’Brien.

      O’Brien had been working across the street from Local 299, where he shared an office and a secretary with attorney William Bufalino, Russell Bufalino’s cousin, who was president of the Teamsters’ jukebox local. By eleven-thirty that morning both O’Brien and William Bufalino had left Teamster headquarters. O’Brien was doing errands; Bufalino was making arrangements for his daughter’s wedding.

      At one o’clock, Hoffa left his cottage at Lake Orion, Michigan. He stopped to see a business associate, who had already gone to lunch. Talking to an employee in the office, Hoffa mentioned that he was going to a meeting where Provenzano and Detroit mobster Anthony Giacalone would be present. Arriving a half-hour early for his two-thirty meeting—which he apparently thought was to be at two—Hoffa had to wait and began to think he had been stood up.

      While the ex-Teamster boss fretted, O’Brien was with Giacalone at a nearby health spa, where O’Brien was picking up gifts for his children’s birthdays. Leaving the club at 2:25 P.M., O’Brien, federal agents say, then drove a car borrowed from Giacalone’s son to pick up Hoffa. He took Hoffa to the place he was staying, where Sheeran and the three Provenzano subordinates were waiting.

      Within a few minutes Hoffa was dead.

      A government informant has said that Hoffa’s body was then stuffed in a fifty-five-gallon oil drum and transported to an unknown destination on a Gateway Transportation Company truck. Another underworld figure who cooperated with the government indicated that Hoffa had been killed by the same mobsters who had worked with the CIA during their plots to kill Castro. He said very specifically that Hoffa’s body had been crushed in a steel compactor for junk cars.

      On the day Hoffa vanished, Rolland McMaster was in Gary, Indiana, meeting with Gateway Transportation executives. His brother-in-law, the head of Gateway’s Detroit steel division, confirmed the alibi.

      On December 4, 1975, McMaster’s brother-in-law and other Gateway officials appeared before the federal grand jury investigating the Hoffa murder. They were followed by McMaster, Sheeran, and the three New Jersey men associated with Provenzano. All five pleaded the Fifth Amendment, as Giacalone and Provenzano had done earlier; all five were represented by William Bufalino.

      The Hoffa Wars is a history of power in the Teamsters Union; how Jimmy Hoffa got it, kept it, lost it, and was prevented from regaining it. It examines the influences on his rise and fall by three of his earliest and closest union associates: Frank Fitzsimmons, Dave Johnson, and Rolland McMaster. And it shows how rank-and-file rebels, corrupt and honest politicians, and organized crime complicated the world of these four Teamster leaders.

      This is the story of the wars fought by and among the Teamster leadership; and how these wars led to the murder of Jimmy Hoffa—which perhaps resulted from his role in two political assassination plots, including one against an American President, as well as from his inability to give up the struggle for personal power. Much of the story is told in the words of the participants themselves, through hundreds of hours of conversations and interviews in truck stops and union halls, in government offices and the storefront headquarters of rebel teamsters.

      The narrative begins in 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression. It has national and international scenes and implications, but for the Teamster leaders themselves it starts, as it ends, in Detroit.

      2 Rebel Hoffa

      No Work signs dangled from crusty string along the strands of barbed wire above the gates of silent factories. Men and women facing another day of unemployment walked dejectedly toward the humiliating but merciful bread lines and soup kitchens supplied by the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. It was 1932, and American ex-doughboys who had fought to make the world safe for democracy bunked down in dingy subways or shacks made of flattened tin cans and cardboard, or hopped freight trains from town to town.

      That same year President Herbert Hoover vetoed an emergency plan for veterans’ bonuses, and veterans from all over the country marched on Washington. Hoover used the army, former comrades, to throw them out of the capital. All over the country people listened in stunned silence to radio news reports, and the marchers’ puzzled bitterness reflected a national despair. The bitterness would last a lifetime. Two of our men were killed by those bastards, one old-timer remembers. Fourteen years later, after months of fighting in the Great War, no one seemed to care about us boys who came home.

      With a hundred thousand businesses shut down, ten million people were unemployed. Most of them had already used up their life savings by the time the Great Depression reached its nadir. The federal government remained preoccupied with futile attempts to enforce Prohibition and collect war debts, apparently assuming that American business would discover a cure for America’s economic illness. But the business community seemed just as helpless as the rest of the country. The beloved comedian Will Rogers summed up the situation: We are the first nation in the history of the world to go to the poorhouse in an automobile.

      There was little for the average guy to cheer about in gloomy 1932, except maybe the local baseball team and the vivid reporting of Damon Runyon and Grantland Rice with such stories as Babe Ruth’s called home run into the right-field bleachers when he led the Yankees to victory over the Chicago Cubs in the ’32 World Series.

      For most people poverty was a way of life. They spent their evenings near the radio, listening to the Amos and Andy program, Maxwell House Coffee’s Showboat or the early big-band sound of Eddie Condon, or to young Bing Crosby croonin’ into the night. The radio was addictive; its commercials for Palmolive Beauty Soap and Calll forrr Philip Morrr-ris! were part of the language. And there was Coca-Cola, the beer, wine, and liquor substitute when nothing ran through the basement still or filled the family bathtub.

      Music lovers were listening to Tin Pan Alley’s George Gershwin, who played his beautiful Rhapsody in Blue at Carnegie Hall that year. Some people shuddered over Aldous Huxley’s latest novel, Brave New World. Others, at a nickel each, swamped their neighborhood movie houses to catch the weekly newsreels and the latest product from Tinseltown. They flocked to see newcomer Jean Harlow, the blond bombshell, and to watch James Cagney push half a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s doll face in Public Enemy, a glorification of a real-life Prohibition antihero, the Chicago gangster Hymie Weiss. Shoulders bouncing, fists up, Cagney popularized the cocky You dirty rats mobster, slugging dames and mugs indiscriminately. And in Public Enemy he achieved the ultimate fate of many of his counterparts—cut down by rivals in a gangland murder. As the film ended, his bullet-riddled body was leaning limply in his sweet mother’s doorway, where the killers had maliciously left him.

      Although the movies improved in 1933, the government’s war against organized crime did not. Just two years earlier, in mid-September, the last of the Mustache Petes—first-generation leaders of the American-Sicilian underworld—had been slaughtered on orders from an ambitious young mob leader named Charles Luciano, who retained the services of free-lance enforcer Meyer Lansky for the series of New York raids called the Night of the Sicilian Vespers. Among the forty dead was Salvatore Maranzano, who in April had declared himself the mythical capo di tutti capi, or boss of bosses, of the hoodlum empire that had thrived on gambling, illegal booze, and prostitution. Maranzano’s claim had in turn followed the sudden death of his rival, Giuseppe Masseria, whom Luciano lured to a Coney Island restaurant to be murdered by his lieutenant, Vito Genovese, while the boss was in the bathroom.

      Four days after the September purge, Luciano proposed to the other mob bosses that a nationwide criminal syndicate be set up. This was Lansky’s idea, and the plan was to divide the United States and its cities into twenty-four subdivisions, each controlled by a regional coordinator, nine of whom would sit on a commission primarily to settle disputes. The organization was under discussion for three years before it was formally established.¹

      With the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, under President Franklin Roosevelt, the criminal underworld continued to flourish. Its illicit distilleries were legal now, and its fleets of liquor trucks could operate around the clock. The mob had money to invest in new areas, and with labor organizing encouraged by Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, unions as well as businesses offered convenient money-making opportunities.

      In Chicago, for example, looking for post-Prohibition investments, the underworld’s heirs to the notorious Al Capone—finally jailed in 1931 for income tax evasion—tried to obtain a labor-and-industry monopoly in the milk distribution business. When they failed to buy off the established union’s leadership and get favorable contracts for mob-controlled distribution firms, the syndicate established a rival union. Companies that refused to negotiate sweetheart contracts with the new truckers’ union—which was stacked with mob henchmen—had to contend with strikes and continuing violence. Even if they gave in and bargained collectively with the crime-ridden union, many legitimate companies, paying decent wages and competing with those that were mob-controlled, were priced or strongarmed out of business.

      At the same time the underworld supplied strikebreaking thugs hired by companies that honest unions were trying to organize. These goon squads were violent and expensive, but many company managements continued to be strongly antiunion throughout the country, especially in Detroit, center of the new automobile industry and a mecca for job hunters from all over the country.

      One of the key strikebreakers in Detroit was Santo Perrone, a coremaker for a steel company, the Detroit Stove Works, who began his long career in labor relations when the Mechanics Educational Society of America tried to unionize the firm. Perrone quickly solicited the aid of his associates in the Detroit underworld, who battled and defeated the trade unionists.

      In return for his work, Vincent Piersante, head of the organized crime unit of the Michigan attorney general’s office, told me in the 1970s, Perrone received some lucrative steel hauling contracts from the Stove Works. He didn’t pay anything for the scrap he hauled away but was making over $4000 a month for keeping the company union-free.

      In spite of such tactics, the steel haulers went on trying to organize, and by 1933 there were two small, powerless Teamster locals on the scene. In April 1933 a third small local union, composed primarily of truck drivers who hauled general commodities around town, affiliated with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen, Stablemen, and Helpers of America, AFL, and was chartered as Teamsters Local 299.

      The International Brotherhood of Teamsters was itself a small organization, but it was growing quickly with the rise of the trucking industry. In 1898, twelve years after the American Federation of Labor was formed, the Team Drivers International Union was founded and received an AFL charter; its scant membership of 1200 drivers was serviced by eighteen local unions, with national headquarters in Detroit. In 1902 some Chicago members rebelled and established the rival Teamsters National Union, with a membership of 18,000 horse handlers. Appealing to both sides to settle their differences, AFL president Samuel Gompers arranged for a national team drivers convention, which was held in Niagara Falls, New York, in October 1903.

      The two groups formed the IBT by merging their combined membership of 50,000 and treasury of $25,000 (members earned about $11.00 per 70-hour work week). International headquarters were in Indianapolis. The first president was Cornelius P. Shea.

      In the midst of Shea’s first and last term he was indicted for extorting money from team owners. Although he was acquitted, he was voted out in 1907 and replaced by a bull-voiced, stiff-necked Irish immigrant, Daniel Tobin of Boston, who exercised relatively little power over the widely decentralized union. Within this pattern of considerable autonomy, Teamster locals began springing up throughout the country.

      Teamster history was turbulent from the outset. In 1905, after a Teamster walkout against the Montgomery Ward Company, the Chicago employers’ association tried to use the incident to wipe out the infant union. The employers failed to destroy the organization, but they won the strike, and this caused another rebellion in Chicago. The Chicago dissidents and others allied against Shea and the Indianapolis leadership split from the IBT and started the United Teamsters of America. They tried to reunite with the international union in 1907, when Tobin took over, but he refused to readmit them; he wanted to punish the rebels and discourage future uprisings. After that, support for the United Teamsters disintegrated except in Chicago, where the dissidents kept their own separatist union intact in spite of IBT influence.

      By 1933 there were some 125,000 Teamster members, heavily concentrated in industrial centers such as Chicago and Detroit. Dan Tobin was still president, and the locals still had enough autonomy to get into trouble. Detroit’s Local 299 had serious problems almost at once. Joseph Campau and Al Milligan, the local’s first president and secretary-treasurer, were under siege by rank and file members trying to prevent an election which they believed was rigged. Tobin sent out an accountant who examined the records and found misuse of the small local’s finances. The IBT executive board removed Campau, Milligan, and other officers, put Local 299 into receivership, and lifted its charter. R. J. Bennett, secretary-treasurer of Local 247, which represented Detroit’s coal haulers, was appointed receiver in 1936.

      Among the three hundred members of Local 299 who had paid their ten-dollar initiation fee and two dollars a month dues was Rolland McMaster, a city cartage driver. Epitomizing the stereotype of a Teamster, McMaster was six-foot-four and weighed 245 pounds. His hands were as big and as firm as shovels, and his thick, protruding upper lip looked as if it had been struck repeatedly with a steel chain. His right eye was penetrating; it seemed to dissect and then analyze its targets while his left eye—which was made of glass—simply stared straight ahead into the distance.

      This awesome-looking man was born in Onaway, Michigan, on March 23, 1914, and soon afterward moved to Detroit with his parents. His father found work at the Ford Motor Company and was able to support his wife and only child through lean years, but the boy had to go to work before he finished high school. After hitching a ride with a truck driver, he decided that hauling freight was what he wanted to do for a living. At sixteen he got his first job, making deliveries for the Michigan Cartage Company to and from the trains and boats around the waterfront of the Detroit River. Later he did the same kind of work for Keeshin Transport.

      The huge, quiet but affable teamster was invited to an early meeting of Local 299. As soon as he had paid his dues McMaster was elected shop steward at Keeshin. I guess because I was so big, he told me with a smile. "They explained to me what a union was, and that I should try to get everybody signed up at the company where I worked.

      There was practically no one in Local 299 at the time, McMaster went on. There was a sheet of paper on the wall that said it was a local union. Three Teamster locals rented the second floor of a big old building. And there was an old guy there, a custodian of the building and also the custodian of the money if you brought any in, if anybody had any.

      He succeeded in unionizing the drivers at Keeshin Transport, but "the boss, Jack Keeshin, came in from Chicago and fired the whole bunch of us.

      So we went on strike, and I was elected chairman of the strike, and we came down and tied up the waterfront. We had a nice old free-for-all here, and everybody joined the union … And then we started to have union meetings, but we didn’t know how to run ’em; nobody knew parliamentary procedure. So we just ran ’em, that’s all. The loudest was generally the one that was boss.

      Other drivers loading and unloading their merchandise on the waterfront soon joined the union. Two of the early members were over-the-road, long-distance drivers, Frank Fitzsimmons for the National Transit Corporation and David Johnson for the United Truck Service.

      Yeah, and after that we were asked to come to the union hall for a meeting, Johnson says. Fitz and I joined the union the same day.

      Fitzsimmons, quiet and spectacled, was no one to be taken lightly. Despite his five-foot-six, 165-pound frame, the fiery-tempered Fitzsimmons, like McMaster, could take care of himself if he had to. And if he needed help there were always plenty of friends to pitch in.

      Born in Jeannette, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, on April 7, 1908, Fitzsimmons had come to Detroit with his family when he was a boy. At sixteen he had to quit school to help pay the medical expenses of his father, who was paralyzed after a stroke. He landed a job as a dock checker on the loading platform at Ternstedt Manufacturing Company, which made automobile hardware, where he worked thirteen hours a night. Young Fitzsimmons soon quit the docks to drive a double-decker bus for the Detroit Motor Bus Company, and at seventeen he got the job with National Transit.

      In those days you did everything, Fitzsimmons has said. Sometimes you worked on the dock, sometimes you’d work as a city driver, and sometimes you’d drive over the road at night.

      After joining Local 299 Fitzsimmons switched jobs again and became a long-distance driver for the Three C Highway Company, which operated between Detroit and Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati. He was popular among the other drivers and became their shop steward in the new local.

      It was tough days for the union. You couldn’t even wear your union button where it could be seen.

      On those endless rainy nights of the long hauls, Fitzsimmons was reassured when he glanced in his rear-view mirror and saw his good friend Dave Johnson trailing close behind. At coffee stops, after joking with the other drivers, Fitzsimmons and Johnson usually stretched out in a booth to sip their coffee and eat their sandwiches, talking about their plans for larger homes, more kids, and a stronger union. Detroit was a growing community, and as the country began to slip out of the Depression and into war, the city offered big opportunities to those smart enough to take advantage of them.

      Johnson, like Fitzsimmons, was from a small town near Pittsburgh. Born in Charleroy on New Year’s Day 1908, Johnson was only five when his parents, who were natives of Finland, moved to southern Illinois, where he went to school and later worked in the coal mines for three years. As a member of the AFL United Mine Workers, Johnson admired men like its president, John L. Lewis, union leaders who could get the workers good contracts and a good wage. In the year of the crash on Wall Street, Johnson left the mines and came to Detroit, where he got a job as a produce hauler for the C. F. Smith Grocery Company.

      In 1932 Johnson was laid off and returned to

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